Web users take just 50 milliseconds to like or hate a website.

From an article originally by Michael Hopkin in Nature News

Researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

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Creative Thing are indebted to a contact of ours who told us at a recent meeting that we did not feature in a Google search for web design in Upton upon Severn. Now, achieving a high search engine listing can be complicated and expensive and take a quite some dedication week in – week out. But for a listing against something fairly focused, such as web design in Upton upon Severn, that should be doable without paying someone else to do it.

We actually thought it would be useful if we treated this as a bit of a case study, illustrating how, with some basic techniques, you can get your site performing against a focused search term without paying an SEO agency. By way of a live demo, we thought we would see how long it takes us to get on to a page one list against the search term “web design in Upton Upon Severn”.

Result: It took one hour of work and less than four hours later Creative Thing were placed second on a Google search for ‘web design in Upton upon Severn’.

With search engine optimisation, there is a 80:20 rule. 80% of what makes a difference can be achieved through 20% of all the options and actions open to you. And using these basic techniques alone we wanted to test how high we could rise on Google for web design in Upton Upon Severn.

Key words: Key words are important. In this case the key words ‘web design in Upton upon Severn’ need to appear on the site with a degree of frequency. Of course they will also need to be sewn into the copy in such a way that it reads well and makes sense. It helps if any key words can be used about six times on each relevant page and if they feature on the home page of the site, then so much the better.

Inbound links: Inbound links from other sites are interpreted by Google as a sign that the target site is a valuable reference point. The more important the referring site, the greater Google will reward you. So e.g. if this site was to achieve an inbound link from a national newspaper site, then it would suddenly shoot up the listings under all of its search terms, including web design in Upton Upon Severn. Apparently fifteen to twenty inbound links will make a massive difference to listing levels, the more important the site the better, so keep plugging away at them.

Fresh content: One of the reasons we choose to use a converted blog as a website, is because it offers us the ability to update frequently without having to tweak our designs or revert back to original design files and edit them. We can simply log in and write a new page as if we were writing an email. So we will refresh our content over the coming days with our objective of promoting Creative Thing as the firm for web design in Upton Upon Severn. We could use other systems for this, but the flexibility of a blog and the ability to change the design from time to time without losing the content is a little too attractive to ignore.

Reporting your site to search engines: It never does any harm to go to the sites of Google, Yahoo, Ask and other search engines and fill in the appropriate online forms telling them about your site. You don’t have to do it every day, but certainly once in a while is a good idea. With a blog (such as this site) it benefits from the links it has programmed into it with the blogging engines. These certainly seem to help its listing in the mainstream search engines.

After trying these things for yourself, you might consider, other strategies, such as dropping links on other sites, placing entries onto forums with web links in your auto signature and other such tactics. Beyond those, pay-per-click online advertising has its part. Certainly if you are serious, using a specialist agency such as our SEO partner Vertical Leap will make a significant impact on search engine position and also your ability to maintain that position.

The basic point here is that before you pay for any search engine optimisation work, try these things for yourself and see how well you can do – it is much cheaper and you might be surprised at how 80% of what you need can be achieved through 20% of techniques out there.

Another year and the best time to put new plans into place. Certainly the amount of free money available through government grants seems to be in plentiful supply. Of course, being in the middle of the flood zone, and as one of very few Business Link accredited web and graphics design firms in the county, we have been able to open up these funding streams for local firms to get them going again after the summer deluge.

Creative Thing are an accredited supplier of graphic and web design services through Business Link. While this is an independent endorsement of our skills, value for money and effectiveness, it also allows us to introduce government funding of up to 50% for many client projects. We have secured funding for web projects, marketing and graphic design based activity in the past. Right now any firm affected by the recent flooding can claim an award of £2500 for projects to help regain their  momentum and all other matched funds remain unaffected.

For further information, contact: David Yates on 0845 388 0338